Hyam Plutzik’s 32 Poems/ 32 Poemas (Suburbano Ediciones, 2022) 32 Poems/ 32 Poemas (2021) is a fully bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of selected poems by the twentieth-century American poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962). The three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Belarus. Plutzik, . . .
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Barque of phosphorOn the palmy beach…—Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida” The summer is now getting hotter,But your beach beer need not taste like water!Here are Florida brewsI’ve selected for youTo pursue as a beach blanket squatter. My recs make a 4-pack and flight,So I’ve fashioned my sequence just right:From lager to Tripel,These . . .
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You’re dead for so long and young just a little. So why notkiss if there’s kissing on offer? There isn’t much timeto be beautiful, and even less to know it. Even now,you are losing your poreless luster.—from “Middle-Aged Sonnet,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell us about one of the first . . .
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The Massachusetts Review is kicking off the summer with our first of many monthly catalogues of new releases from our recent contributors. This June, we will also list earlier 2022 releases to supplement your reading. Keep your eyes peeled at the end of every month for the next installment! 2021 Kathryn A. . . .
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I found a pensión in the Barri Gòtic, not far from La Rambla. An old woman with a limp welcomed me and took my money and showed me to my room. I seem to remember that one of her shoes had a thick heel and sole (to compensate for, I suppose, an . . .
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“Not just what I feel but what I knowAnd how I know it, my unscholarliness,My rawness, all rise out of the cobbledLandscape I was born to.Those of you raised similarly,I want to say: this is nota detriment and it is not a benefit…”—from “My Education,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022) Tell . . .
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A few years ago, I placed my younger self into a poem dreaming of a potato-chip-flavored kiss. All-American kisses occured in lives where candy bars andsleeping with your hair wet were also permitted, where the attention of Americanmothers cast soft glowe through the house and clicked off at night.—from “Ars Poetica,” Volume . . .
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The living room is crowned by a painting, one that has no purpose other than to take precedence over the armchairs. In the scene there are two deer, grazing on a sparse, dry plain: everything is yellow, from the animals to the meadow to a shadeless sky at high noon. There is . . .
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If I write myself into a state, does that make the state false? In the background of one of the many pictures I take of Patrycja by the feeding ring,two of the horses bit each other. Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?—from “Eastern Washington Diptych,” Volume . . .
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Photo by Ally Almore O taxi glass, O broken fall, be soprano, be alto.Give me sea sharp, give doh doh doh, give mi fa so?O gravity, slip soft. Lay with this sorry child before they soulsplint & ugly up this here garden.—from “The Lion Tamer’s Daughter vs. The Ledge,” Volume 63, Issue 1 . . .
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